A Sighting of Wild Wolves

Dusk has come. We are driving back through Yellowstone National Park. My face is pressed up against the window, my eyes are glued to the landscape. All day I have been positioned like this, with the hope of getting a glimpse of Yellowstone's pride and joy- grey wolves.

While driving along side a long stretch of meadows, we see two are three cars pulled off to the side of the road. Usually if it's an important animal sighting, there is blocked traffic and plenty of cars stopped- as we saw with the black bear sighting earlier that day. My mom looked off into the distance and saw two small shapes about a half mile away. They were cruising along the landscape. Finally I spotted them as well. The car stopped. I jumped out.

The mere chance that it may just be two wild wolves made me shake with excitement. I got out my camera, which had little memory and battery power left. While zooming up as far as my camera would allow, I silently watched the beauty of these animals as they moved at amazing speeds in the distance. While shaking from excitement, I captured as many pictures as I could- not even knowing for sure what these animals were.

When they disappeared, I returned to the car. We began to take a look at the treasures I had received. It was unclear whether they were coyotes or wolves. After asking for some opinions and doing a few comparisons, we figured out that they must have been wolves.

Here are some of the pictures I captured:














They were pretty far away when I tried to capture these pictures, so the detail is very distorted. However, we can assume that this is what they looked like up-close (or at least something like this):







This is McKinley. He is the alpha male of his new pack at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center. The Discovery Center was right across the street from our hotel in West Yellowstone. My two sisters and I went there the next day to get a closer look at the wolves.